Book Image

Learn Azure Sentinel

By : Richard Diver, Gary Bushey
Book Image

Learn Azure Sentinel

By: Richard Diver, Gary Bushey

Overview of this book

Azure Sentinel is a Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) tool developed by Microsoft to integrate cloud security and artificial intelligence (AI). Azure Sentinel not only helps clients identify security issues in their environment, but also uses automation to help resolve these issues. With this book, you’ll implement Azure Sentinel and understand how it can help find security incidents in your environment with integrated artificial intelligence, threat analysis, and built-in and community-driven logic. This book starts with an introduction to Azure Sentinel and Log Analytics. You’ll get to grips with data collection and management, before learning how to create effective Azure Sentinel queries to detect anomalous behaviors and patterns of activity. As you make progress, you’ll understand how to develop solutions that automate the responses required to handle security incidents. Finally, you’ll grasp the latest developments in security, discover techniques to enhance your cloud security architecture, and explore how you can contribute to the security community. By the end of this book, you’ll have learned how to implement Azure Sentinel to fit your needs and be able to protect your environment from cyber threats and other security issues.
Table of Contents (22 chapters)
1
Section 1: Design and Implementation
4
Section 2: Data Connectors, Management, and Queries
9
Section 3: Security Threat Hunting
14
Section 4: Integration and Automation
17
Section 5: Operational Guidance

Understanding connectors

Azure Sentinel relies on Log Analytics to store large volumes of data, in order to process that data and find useful information about potential risks and security threats. The data required may be located in many different types of resources across many different platforms, which is why we need many different options for connecting to those data sources. Understanding the options available, and how to configure them, is key to developing a strong data architecture to support the Azure Sentinel solution.

A summary of the connectors is shown in the following screenshot:

Figure 3.3 – Azure Sentinel connector flow

Connectors can be categorized based on the method used to ingest data from source. Currently, there are four main types:

  • Native connections
  • Direct connections
  • API connections
  • Agent-based (Windows Server Agent and Syslog)

Let's explore each of these types in more detail.

Native connections...